It was a knowing world that both saw them together, and did not see them together. The neighborhood revolved around nothing, as each individual house was a world in itself and only had brief suspicions about the oddities that could or could not happen next door.
Every evening around five o’clock, Danielle would cease her experiments with composting and fertilizers to take a shower. The way she rinsed her aging white limbs reminded her of how she would wash the shorn stems each day in the flower shop she owned for the majority of her life. She sold her shop the year before so she could enter into something similar to retirement. Her graying and blonde hair lost its thick wave in the shower and fell nearly to her breasts. The way the rippling water moved the bunches of strands reminded her of yellow ribbons. She could see streams of dirt swirl around her toes and down the drain. She picked up a lot of dirt on the days she gardened and developed her compost pile. It amazed her how doing anything, even digging a hole with a hand-sized shovel would leave traces of itself on her. She wondered if life left traces of what the person went through on their soul, immortal messes.
When the 5-minute egg-timer that she set went off, she turned off the water and thought about saving the world.
All the world is yellow ribbons. She patted her frame down with a towel that she would use to dry herself for a week then use to clean the kitchen before she would wash it. She wanted to save the world.
Danielle could not help thinking about the dirt she picked up through her life, the kind carried from life to death. Some days, she would hardly think of death. Others, she would wake up in the middle of the night to her own head saying in a hundred years, I won’t be alive. The oncoming morning, in particular, she woke up thinking about the inevitability of it. It was days like this that she wished she had children, grandchildren, increasingly diluted versions of her that would carry her nose for five generations, her love of olives for ten.
Most of the time, she did not regret it, the children. All the neighborhood children loved Danielle, it was her friends first, and then when she lost all of her friends her neighbors who would ask her why she did not have any children. You’d be a great mother! They stopped asking when they found out about candles and the fact that she would ask any question any child asked her during their visits across the street. Danielle had no fear of fire, and no fear of teaching children whatever she could. In her life, Danielle went to college, she owned a flower shop, she was no divorcee. She was no man’s widow. But, there it was, only when she was alone, only late at night or early in the morning. In five-hundred years. . . she would think.
She would visit Mr. Heckerman most days. She made more of an effort to visit him on days when she started to think about her incredible problem of nothing.
And when the moonlight lit her descent across the street to Mr. Heckerman’s house, anyone who saw her would forget her age and think that she was beautiful, and hope she was happy.
“That kid who used my tools last week fell out of the tree house today,” Mr. Heckerman said as he took off her coat.
“Was he okay?” She thought about James, whose house was not far from hers. James never visited like the other children in the neighborhood. She did not remember seeing him around much anywhere in the neighborhood except when he shuffled to and from school.
“Just a sprain.” he rubbed the small of her back, she leaned in to kiss him “I made popcorn, we could watch some movies.”